by Michael Lopresto

When it comes to explaining human cognition and human uniqueness, everyone seems to think that nature and nurture constitute a false dichotomy. Both nature and nurture work together harmoniously to contribute to the cognitive traits that make humans profoundly different to every other animal on the Earth. Unlike every other animal on Earth, humans are uniquely flexible; we have inhabited every kind of environment, engaged in intergenerational social learning, cooperated with those outside of our immediate group, accurately described things we'll never directly observe, and much more. Humans are cognitively flexible, behaviourally flexible, communicatively flexible and representationally flexible. Representational systems employed by humans are open-ended and unprecedented in the animal kingdom: natural languages like English and Chinese, artificial languages like predicate logic, formal languages like those in mathematics, pictures, diagrams, weather maps are all but a few of the representational systems employed by humans (not to mention mental representations, which are likely to be analogues of the aforementioned systems).

One of the central questions of cognitive science is explaining how humans acquire cognitive traits, including ones that contribute to human uniqueness. Is the trait for language innate or learned? Is the trait for mental time travel (the ability to experience one's past or future) innate or learned? Is the trait for moral reasoning innate or learned? And so forth.

Nativists are those who say that lots of cognitive traits are innate, and empiricists are those who say that very few cognitive traits are innate. The nativism/empiricism distinction is not to be confused with the rationalism/empiricism debate of early modern philosophy. That debate was primarily over epistemology, while the contemporary debate is primarily over psychology. However, questions of epistemology and psychology were systematically conflated, as Kant and others pointed out, and we ought to be careful not to conflate the same questions now. Even so, there are fairly clear links between the two questions. The rationalists of early modern philosophy, like Descartes and Leibniz, argued that a great many cognitive traits were innate, and the empiricists of that era, like Locke and Hume, argued that very few cognitive traits were innate. (Although those philosophers spoke in terms of “innate knowledge” and “innate ideas”—phrases that certainly need careful interpretation).

However, the question “Is cognitive trait X innate or learned?” presupposes that the concepts INNATE and LEARNED are somewhat well defined.[*] (I take it for granted that the concept COGNITIVE TRAIT is uncontroversial, i.e. phenotypic traits relating to things like thinking, inference, perception, intelligence, and so forth.) Our question certainly doesn't presuppose that for any cognitive trait it's all or nothing; totally innate or totally learned, or even totally acquired through environmental interaction.

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by Gerald Dworkin

I am finishing the six months a year that I live in California. While here I have been working on the campaign, led by an organization called Compassion and Choices, to get a bill passed by the California legislature–SB128. This is a bill to allow medically-assisted dying in the state of California. It is modeled on the measure passed by referendum in Oregon in 1994 by 51% of the voters. A legal injunction halted implementation of that law until 1997 when the Ninth Circuit lifted the injunction. In 1992 Californians rejected a referendum legalising assisted-dying, and the legislature has rejected similar bills four times.

Some form of medically assisted-dying is now legal in Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont , and one county of New Mexico. This latter reminds me of Woody Allen’s view on the existence of God. He exists everywhere except in certain parts of New Jersey.

The methods of legalization differed from state to state. Oregon was by referendum. Montana was a Supreme Court ruling. Vermont was by statute. Washington’s ballot initiative passed by 58% of the voters.

My own interest in these issues has been long-standing. In 1998 I wrote, together with two other philosophers, a book called Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide. Two of us argued for its moral and legal permissibility; one against. I should note that the use of the term “Physician-assisted suicide” is now politically incorrect, for tactical reasons. I understand that the popular prejudice against suicide makes it more difficult to rally support for the bills I favor. And even some potential users of such measures object to their death-certificate reading “suicide.” But to list the cause of death, as many such bills do, as the underlying disease process seems to me simply a lie. What caused the person diagnosed with terminal cancer to die now, rather than somewhat later, is the secobarbital the patient took. But learning to keep silent about such terminological matters was only one of many lessons I had to learn.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

If there were a canonical essay topic for the Hindi classes that I struggled through as a child, “The arrival of the monsoon” would be a leading candidate. So typical a topic that it almost constituted its own form and mode of cultural practice, it was assigned to us several times a year. And we dutifully produced accounts of hot streets and families watching for storm clouds from verandahs and rushing winds and skies flickering with lightning and children playing in the streets and grateful farmers fornicating in suddenly-muddy fields while relieved trees looked on.

But of course this was an entirely fitting essay topic. Much as the coming of winter looms in the imagination of people in further latitudes, the coming of the rains is atavistically woven into the fabric of the subcontinental consciousness, stirring strange rain-fed yearnings in the blood, reflected back at us in art and in politics. The arrival of the monsoon is tracked for weeks, the subject of prayers and village ritual and newspaper op-eds and roadside chatter. Musical forms are dedicated to the first rains; governments fall because of late rains. And, fittingly, the first storms of the season are grand affairs, full of sound and fury, signifying life and fertility. Indeed, for years several friends of mine thought that one got pregnant by dancing around trees in the rain, based on their extensive watching of Hindi movies.

I worked on a farm for half a year after college, through the dry scorching heat of the summer (all fine dust and burnt skin and plants with insufficiently sublimated death drives) and into the coming of the monsoon. My most vivid memories from that year are the monsoon evenings spent sitting on the verandah after a day at work in the fields, drinking rum and watching the rain upon the rice fields and the lightning play through the sky, trees suddenly illuminated by flashes, slightly damp dogs curled up at my feet. And this is to say nothing of other memories of watching the rain fall in the courtyards of old Calcutta houses, which should justifiably be the subject of a novel-cycle about memory and decay (it probably is).

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by Matt McKenna

Not since last December's American Sniper has a simple blockbuster action film generated as much serious discussion as Mad Max: Fury Road. Where American Sniper seemed to tie people in knots about its stance on war, Fury Road has divided moviegoers as to the film's feminist credentials. Is it really a feminist film? Is it merely a film that has non-terrible female characters? Or is it actually an anti-feminist film in feminist film's clothing? Who knows, but what both American Sniper and Fury Road make quite clear is that a straightforward action movie is wide open to interpretation as writers transform its explosions into exegesis, its car chases into consternation, and its body count into boycotts.

The plot of Fury Road is terrifically thin: Max (Tom Hardy) is captured by a violent totalitarian post-apocalyptic dieselpunk gang but has the good fortune of being set free during a calamitous rebellion lead by the gang's once-loyal lieutenant, Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Max and Furiosa eventually team up, blow up a lot of cars/people, and–excuse the spoiler–kill the bad guy. That's all the plot there is, but that's all the plot the movie needs as the attraction of the film has nothing to do with story and everything to do with its wonderfully cinematic action sequences. It may therefore seem odd for so many words to be written about a film whose story can be losslessly compressed into a compound sentence or two, but it turns out this lack of specificity in the film is precisely what is required to generate such high-minded dialogue between interested moviegoers.

There's a segment in the Sophie Fiennes directed, Slavoj Zizek narrated film Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Zizek describes the first half of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as being a capable vessel for ideology because of its “universal adaptability.” In the film, Zizek explains that the symphony has been used at different times to promote all sorts of conflicting political ideologies such as Nazism, communism, and a host of other -isms. Zizek attributes the symphony's ideological flexibility to its being “an empty container, open to all possible meanings.” He doesn't say it exactly like this, but I think Zizek is calling Beethoven's Ninth the musical equivalent of Murphy's Law. Where Murphy's Law is usually stated something like, “anything that can happen will happen,” Zizek's Law takes the form of “anything that can be read into this thing will be read into this thing.” Doesn't that pretty much describe Fury Road as well?

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by Eric Byrd

Reading To the Lighthouse I was especially struck by her treatment of what Henry James calls, in his preface to The Tragic Muse, “the artist-life,” as a “human complication and social stumbling block.” The tension of contemplative withdrawal and selfless attention, the janicular simultaneity of egoism – egoism as a revelation of spirit, egoism as a spiritual imposition — struck James, and it seems to have struck Woolf, “as one of the half-dozen great primary motives.” Both James and Woolf were children of voluminous Victorians, would-be sages attended by disciples but fundamentally dependent on their wives; philosophers who had to be supported while they wrote and brooded. On patriarchal needs, the memoirs seem to intersect:

He needed always a woman to sympathize, to flatter, to console. Why? Because he was conscious of his failure as a philosopher, as a writer. But his creed made him ashamed to confess this need of sympathy to men. The attitude that his intellect made him adopt with men, made him the most modest, most reasonable of men. Vanessa, on Wednesdays, was the recipient of much discontent that he had suppressed; and her refusal to accept her role, part slave, part angel of sympathy, exacerbated him so that he was probably unconscious of his own barbarous violence…

(“A Sketch of the Past”)

We simply lived by her, in proportion as we lived spontaneously, with an equanimity of confidence…which left us free for detachments of thought and flights of mind, experiments, so to speak, on the assumption of our genius and our intrinsic interest, that I look back upon as to a luxury of the unworried that is scarce of this world. This was a support on which my father rested with the absolute whole of his weight…

All which is imaged for me while I see our mother listen, at her work, to the full music of the 'papers.' She could do that by the mere force of her complete availability, and could do it with a smoothness of surrender that was like an array of all the perceptions.

(Notes of a Son and Brother)

Mr. Ramsay rests on his wife with the absolute whole of his weight. He imposes his hunger for sympathy tactlessly, childishly, to the rage and impatience of the actual children. Mrs. Ramsay wonders if her husband thinks he would have written better books had he not married (Nietzsche said the married philosopher “belongs in a comedy”).

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by Maniza Naqvi

What do the Swedes Robert, Ludvig and Alfred Nobel have in common with South Asian Multani pilgrims and traders? Well for starters a certain fire in the belly of Azerbaijan.

I wake up to the sounds and smells of explosives, the whiff of dynamite mixed with a faint scent of petroleum which sometimes wafts on the breeze here, it is midnight in Baku, and there are extravagant fireworks, over the Caspian waters, framed in my hotel window—as Azerbaijan marks its Independence day. I am awake, and from the tower where I lie, I stare into the near distance at the make believe flames superimposed on three glass towers shaped as flames and lit up at night, appearing like the licks of burning tongues. These are, yes, The Flame Towers, a monument of sorts to free enterprise, trading and a homage to fire temples in the beautiful city of Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea on the peninsula of Absheron, in Azerbaijan, in the South Caucuses, north of Iran, South of Georgia and Russia, west of Turkmenistan across the sea and East of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh and that other country one doesn’t name here.

Baad e koo–city of winds—the strong gusts that rise from the south and the sea are called Khaezaeri while those from the north are called Kilavar. The Caspian in Azeri is Khaezer.

I am wide awake, resolutely denying jetlag and contemplate if I should work and finish the note I am to write on Somalia.I have a few hours before my day is to start. But staring at my reflection on the window glass, all I manage to scribble is: From Mogadishu to Baku there is you in common—From Mogidishu to Baku it always ends with you. I mull over the lines and tell myself I will write this. At some point. But as I drown and drowse and surrender to sleep, the moon wanes over the sea slick with oil rising to its surface and I dream of suns rising. My back hurts from the long flight over. I send whatsapp videos back home of the Towers.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

I'm currently in the process of moving away from New York City and while I've only lived here for two quick years, now seems as good a time as any for some reflection. Apparently since Joan Didion wrote a piece in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 about her departure from the city (on a temporary basis as it turned out), it's become a trope for self-centered New Yorkers to announce their leaving the city in the same way, as if this place cares about one less inhabitant. I guess I'm more of a New Yorker than I let myself realize.

While many of my peers seemed to consider moving to New York an end-goal in itself, I had never intended to end up here and was primed for resentment that only grew as time passed. To me, it seemed that New York was a fantastic hoax, where everyone claims to love it and to be happy to be there, so no one is able to admit that they feel otherwise. At times I have felt like screaming that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. In “Goodbye to All That” Didion says that New York is “a city only for the very young.” Leslie Jamison, in a passage about living in New York in her novel The Gin Closet, says, “The truth of being young felt like an ugly secret that everyone had agreed to keep.”

Within the surplus of literature about New York writers love to utter universal truths about the city, probably not taking the time to consider if their experience is the same as the woman who does their laundry or the guy who guards the doors at their midtown office. My observations of New York come from the conscious vantage of someone who is white, educated, and gainfully employed in a city where one is likely to have an entirely different experience if she isn't one or any of those things. It would be very easy to write about unfathomably high rent prices, working too many hours, and competing with all of my former classmates for jobs and grad school spots. But that is the allure of the New York I know, after all. It's a difficult and competitive place to thrive which is precisely why many ambitious people want to be here—a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

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by Bill Benzon

Frank Wilczek, theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate at MIT, has recently published his speculation on what physics will yield over the next 100 years [1]. It’s an interesting and provocative read, if a bit obscure to me (I never studied physics beyond a mediocre high school program). And, of course, I had little choice but to wonder:

What about the human sciences in the next 100 years?

My initial reaction to that one (with a nod to Buster Keaton): Damfino!

But then I actually began to think about it and things got interesting, in part because some of Wilczek’s speculations about physics have implications for the human sciences.

I begin with a failed prognostication of my own from four decades ago. Then I move on to Wilczek’s central theme, unification, and conclude with some observations about memory and quantum computing.

Computing, the Prospero Project, and Cultural Singularity

Back in 1976 David Hays and I published a review of the then current computational linguistics literature for Computers and the Humanities [2]. At the time Hays was a senior scholar in the Linguistics Department with a distinguished career going back to his early days at the RAND Corporation, where he led their work in machine translation. I was a graduate student in English literature and a member of Hays’s research group.

Once we’d finished with the research roundups standard in such papers we indulged in a fantasy we called Prospero (p. 271): “a system with a semantics so rich that it can read all of Shakespeare and help in investigating the processes and structures that comprise poetic knowledge. We desire, in short, to reconstruct Shakespeare the poet in a computer.” We then went to specify, in a schematic way, what would go into Prospero and what one might do with Prospero as a research tool.

We did not offer a delivery date for this marvel, specifying only a “remote future” (p. 273). That, I’m sure, ways Hays’s doing; he was too experienced in such matters to speculate on due dates and told me so on more than one occasion. I’m quite sure that, in my own mind, I figured that Prospero might be ready for use in 20 years, certainly within my lifetime. Twenty years from 1976 would have been 1996, but nothing like Prospero existed at that time, nor was it on the visible horizon. Now, almost two decades after that we still have no Prospero-like computational systems nor any likely prospects for building one.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In Oslo on May 19 John Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the 2015 Abel Prize “for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis”. The Abel Prize is barely a decade old but has quickly became one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. To learn more about this year's winners, visit the Abel Prize webpage here. For an insight into the personalities of the two winners, I especially recommend these short videos.

This year's prize comes with sad news. On their way home from the award ceremony, John and Alicia Nash were killed in an auto accident. You can read the New York Times obituary here.

Last year at 3QD we talked about Yakov Sinai's work in dynamical systems. By coincidence this year's winners' work is closely related to the “exotic” non-Euclidean geometries we discussed at 3QD in March. It's a good chance to dig a little deeper into these topics and get the flavor of Nash and Nuremberg's work. Like last year I should say straight off that I'm not an expert, but I'm happy to talk about some cool mathematics.

John Nash, of course, is one of the most widely known mathematicians of the twentieth century. His life story was told by Sylvia Nasar in “A Beautiful Mind”. The book was made into an award-winning film of the same name starring Russell Crowe. It tells of Nash's brilliant work as a young man and his subsequent difficulties with mental health issues. It's a dramatic story and well worth watching the film. It should go without saying, but the movie turns the drama knob up to eleven and shouldn't be taken as an accurate depiction of Nash's life. For a more nuanced version of events I recommend Nasar's book.

The movie closes with John Nash winning the Nobel prize in Economics for his work in game theory. In game theory we use mathematics to study potential strategies, outcomes, etc., when two or more players are in competition. If you only think about tic-tac-toe, chess, and other such games it first it sounds like a mathematical trifle. But once you begin to look around you see players in competition everywhere: people and corporations in the marketplace, countries in geopolitics, species in evolutionary competition, etc. Game theory is serious business!

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right here

put down the guitar and
puddled a cord at the base of the microphone stand
just after there’d been music right here at hand
.

is it always here at hand?
.

just yesterday
in a field behind my house
the sun hove into view again
as if it would never burn out

Jim Culleny
5/20/15

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

I was first inspired to write a Qasida in English when I came across Lorca’s “Casida de la Rosa” while researching the history of Al Andalus for my book-length series of poems on Muslim Spain. I also knew of Qasida poems in Urdu. For Lorca, who was a native of Granada, Andalucia, and had fallen under the spell of Andalusi history, writing a “casida” was a way to enter an erased, haunting, vivifying past whose mystique and poetic sensibility he identified with and felt the urgency to express. Lorca’s work was produced at a time, when, according to a contemporary of Lorca’s, Europe was “suffering from a withering of the ability to desire.” A recurrent word in Lorca’s poetry is “quiero” or “I desire,” and in Bly’s words, Lorca “adopted old Arab forms to help entangle that union of desire and darkness, which the ancient Arabs loved so much.”

The qasida can certainly be seen as a poetic tradition with desire as its central theme. The classical Arabic qasida has fifty to a hundred lines with a fixed rhyming pattern. It is divided into three main thematic components and further divided into smaller units of certain fixed metaphors, which find nuances in the hands of the particular poet using the form. The primary metaphor that constitutes the qasida is that of being in sojourn, lost in the desert, in the pursuit of the loved one whose caravan always eludes the speaker. The journey, a figurative and literal subject of the qasida, may stand for desire. The different movements in the poem signify specific places along the journey that co-relate to the poet’s emotional journey: the origins of his desire, nostalgia for past campsites, intense passion for the absent beloved, the larger map of life, the pride he takes in his tribe/caravan, how he relates to the tribe of the beloved, so on. The tone of the subsections could be laudatory, melancholic or romantic, allowing even humor and light-hearted derision of other tribes in one of the sub-sections. The imagery often tends to be abstract or symbolic, relying on the traditional, complex network of metaphors. As the ancient form of qasida developed through the centuries and across cultures, poets adapted it to suit concerns relevant to them, as in the case of the Andalusi Arabic poets that Lorca emulates.

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by Misha Lepetic

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.”
~ John Cage

Not long after moving to New York around 2000, I picked up an odd little side gig, as a gallery sitter at a space called Engine 27. Taking its name from the decommissioned TriBeCa firehouse which housed it, Engine 27 wasn't your usual art gallery, but rather one that focused exclusively on sound art. It achieved this by meticulously renovating the ground floor of the firehouse into a nearly perfect acoustic environment. Floors, walls and ceilings were treated with rugs and acoustic paneling. Speakers were strategically situated throughout the roughly 2000 square feet; they could be found lurking in corners, or hanging from the ceiling. If you weren't careful you might stub your toe against a subwoofer squatting on a seemingly random patch of floor. Pretty much anything that wasn't already black was painted so, and the lights were kept low. Feeding all the speakers was a basement full of amplifiers, computers and other hardware. It was, to put it mildly, a sound nerd's paradise.

Engine 27 was the brainchild of Jack Weisberg, a self-taught sound engineer who earned his nut innovating approaches to both arena-scale sound and smaller, more high-brow projects. As an example of the latter, he worked with artist-composer Max Neuhaus on the 1978 MoMA iteration of his “Underground” project, which projected sound into the Sculpture Garden from beneath a ventilation shaft. (Neuhaus' Times Square version, sponsored by the Dia Foundation, ran from 1977 to 1992, then was reincarnated ten years later, but, befitting the fragility of sound, is currently ‘temporarily unavailable due to construction'.) Jack was a curmudgeonly fellow and used to getting things done his way. This is perhaps why Engine 27 became an extraordinary space for practicing what some people call “deep listening”, which for me is just a tacit admission that we don't listen very closely to much of anything anymore.

Part of what makes good sound art so fascinating is exactly this prerequisite. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic here, though, since our culture, and especially what we consider to be ‘art', is so biased towards the visual. And for the purposes of the current argument – ie, I am sidestepping the question of what differentiates sound from music – the visual bias provides us with the dispensation of a quick scan. The people who speed-walk their way through an art museum will later on assert how great the museum was. They may even have the selfie to prove it. In some minimal way, they would be correct to say that they saw the art, but this is no different from saying that you “saw the grass” while driving down the freeway at 80mph. In this manner a viewer is entirely justified in dismissing an Ad Reinhardt painting as ‘just black' (although ‘none more black' might be more accurate). What else could he or she do, without spending the time needed to let the painting actually unfold before one's eyes, as was Reinhardt's intention?

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by Jalees Rehman

“The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize. What matters here is the framework— or the procedure— rather than the outcome or the substance. Limits and constraints, in other words, can be productive— even if the entire conceit of “the Internet” suggests otherwise.

Evgeny Morozov in “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism“

We cherish privacy in health matters because our health has such a profound impact on how we interact with other humans. If you are diagnosed with an illness, it should be your right to decide when and with whom you share this piece of information. Perhaps you want to hold off on telling your loved ones because you are worried about how it might affect them. Maybe you do not want your employer to know about your diagnosis because it could get you fired. And if your bank finds out, they could deny you a mortgage loan. These and many other reasons have resulted in laws and regulations that protect our personal health information. Family members, employers and insurances have no access to your health data unless you specifically authorize it. Even healthcare providers from two different medical institutions cannot share your medical information unless they can document your consent.

The recent study “Privacy Implications of Health Information Seeking on the Web” conducted by Tim Libert at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania) shows that we have a for more nonchalant attitude regarding health privacy when it comes to personal health information on the internet. Libert analyzed 80,142 health-related webpages that users might come across while performing online searches for common diseases. For example, if a user uses Google to search for information on HIV, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage on HIV/AIDS (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/) is one of the top hits and users will likely click on it. The information provided by the CDC will likely provide solid advice based on scientific results but Libert was more interested in investigating whether visits to the CDC website were being tracked. He found that by visiting the CDC website, information of the visit is relayed to third-party corporate entities such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The webpage contains “Share” or “Like” buttons which is why the URL of the visited webpage (which contains the word “HIV”) is passed on to them – even if the user does not explicitly click on the buttons.

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